Music of Tribute is a Labor Records historic series that pays homage to great composers by linking their works with music–often unknown, rediscovered or previously unrecorded–that pays tribute to them through dedication, homage or thematic reference.

In 1909, six great French composers—including Ravel, Debussy, Dukas, Vincent d’Indy and Reynaldo Hahn—created new works based on a musical spelling of Haydn’s name in celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the death of the great Viennese master; eighty-nine years later, the English composer George Benjamin added his own homage based on the same theme. All these tributes plus a Sonatina “Homage à Haydn” by the Croatian composer Davorin Kempf and a rollicking Capriccietto after a rough Viennese folk song (that had been previously treated by Haydn) by the German composer Wolfgang Hochstein have been wrapped around three sparkling piano sonatas by the master himself, including the late, great C major Sonata, all brilliantly recorded by the young Croatian pianist Javor Bračić.

This is the seventh in the Music of Tribute series from Labor; music by and in homage to Heitor Villa-Lobos, Claude Debussy, Gabriel Fauré, Domenico Scarlatti, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Alban Berg were the earlier releases in this much-lauded ongoing series.

A new recording by the young Lithuanian pianist Ieva Jokubaviciute pays homage to a veritable mountain of early 20th-century Modernism—Alban Berg. Weaving an intricate tapestry of scintillating performances of Berg’s piano sonata and Opus 2 songs and of works written in tribute to him by Giacinto Scelsi, Franghiz Ali-Zadeh, Ross Lee Finney, Jacob Gilboa, and Hans Erich Apostel, Volume 6 of the series explores the wide-ranging, global connections between Berg’s monumental musical world and the creative music that it has influenced.

Beatrice Berthold performs a “Tribute to Johann Sebastian Bach” in the form of works by the master himself (including various preludes and fugues as well as the famous “Italian Concerto”) plus works by 20th century masters ranging from one of the great Bachianas Brasileiras by the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos to works of tribute by Béla Bartók, Dmitri Shostakovich, Francis Poulenc, Terry Riley, Arthur Honegger, György Kurtág and others.

The Russian/German piano virtuosa, Viktoria Lakissova, performs a Tribute to Domenico Scarlatti, playing Scarlatti Sonatas in alternation with works written in honor of the 18th-century Italian by composers of the 19th and 20th centuries, including some of the major piano titans of the past century.

"A new recording by the young Yugoslav virtuoso Vladimir Valjarević pays
homage to the great French composer, Gabriel Fauré. In 1922, seven of
Fauré’s pupils were commissioned to write music for an album in his honor.
Among those who contributed were Maurice Ravel, Georges Enesco, Charles
Koechlin and Florent Schmitt. These works of homage alternate with piano
music by Fauré himself including some of his most graceful and attractive
pieces which stand directly between the tradition of Couperin and Chopin
and the innovations of his students Ravel and Debussy."

When Debussy died in 1918, the French magazine La revue musicale commissioned ten leading composers of the day - including Bartók, Stravinsky, Satie, Ravel and Manuel de Falla - to compose tributes to the pioneering French composer. The outstanding Bulgarian-American pianist Pavlina Dukovska, the Brazilian guitarist Carlos Barbosa-Lima and others have recorded - for the first time! - the complete set alternating tribute pieces with Debussy's own piano music, mostly taken from his two books of Préludes but also including such gems as L'isle joyeuse and La plus que lente.

Tribute to Villa-Lobos, performed by the Brazilian pianist José Eduardo Martins, is the first recording in the series and features works by the great Brazilian master and by a group of composers from Brazil, Portugal, Austria, Spain and Cuba via the United States. Like Villa-Lobos himself, these works cover a diverse range of styles, popular and experimental, that evoke the spirit of their distinguished predecessor and allow the older works to be heard in a new way.